Thaddeus Stevens is a name that not nearly enough Americans have heard. It never popped up when I was learning history in school, using textbooks that still described the “carpetbaggers” of Reconstruction-era America as sly Northern villains. Stevens, an early Republican member of the House of Representatives, served in an era when his clear moral stance was often shunned. He was a civil rights icon and the exact kind of ally Black Americans need again today.
By the by: I know that this piece is publishing on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, so I want to acknowledge that it feels weird to be praising a white man at this particular moment. But Stevens has been on my mind lately, both as the new Congress gets to work, with its mandate to undo some of President Donald Trump’s most racist policies, and as the Senate prepares for Trump’s second impeachment trial.
I first learned about Stevens in 2019, when I was hosting a podcast covering Trump’s first impeachment. I was particularly fascinated by the impeachment of President Andrew Johnson, the only one to take place before I was born. Luckily, historian Brenda Wineapple had that year published her engaging book “The Impeachers: The Trial of Andrew Johnson and the Dream of a Just America.” Wineapple focuses on Stevens and the other members of Congress who tried to steer post-Civil War America away from its racist past as they challenged Johnson, who became their main obstacle after President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated in 1865.
Stevens has seesawed in historians’ eyes over the last 150 years, but Wineapple, like most more recent scholars, is full of praise for his anti-slavery stances. An abolitionist, the ornery, witty congressman with a club foot was serving his first term when he staked out his position against the Compromise of 1850, which he presciently called “the fruitful mother of future rebellion, disunion, and civil war.” By the end of the next year, he’d resigned from the anti-Jackson Whig caucus, ending any chance of renomination to his Pennsylvania seat for a third term.
It was almost a decade later when Stevens returned to Congress as a Radical Republican, as his coalition called itself. Think of him at this point as a Civil War-era cross between Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Rather than accept a piecemeal dismantling of chattel slavery, Stevens’s version of the “squad” was all for a swift and complete end of what they, rightly, saw as an overwhelming force of evil.
Stevens couldn’t accept the notion that “one race of men are to have the exclusive right forever to rule this nation” over all others: “Wherein does this differ from slavery except in degree?”
But if Stevens was frustrated during the war by Lincoln’s slow acceptance of total emancipation, he was livid at Johnson’s version of Reconstruction. Rather than ensure that the newly freed Black population of the South would have equal rights, Johnson readily welcomed the Southern states back into the political fold, admitting them back into Congress and appointing as their leaders white supremacists who, like him, believed “this is a white man’s government.”
In poor health at the age of 73, Stevens still had the strength to organize Congress against Johnson. He couldn’t accept the notion that “one race of men are to have the exclusive right forever to rule this nation” over all others. “Wherein does this differ from slavery except in degree?” he asked in a speech to Congress in December 1865. Using his knowledge of House rules, and in cooperation with the Senate, Stevens made sure that Southern states couldn’t be seated in Congress until they’d rewritten their constitutions to provide rights to formerly enslaved Black residents.
He stuck by what he knew was right, even when it was unpopular, but he also knew better than to let the perfect get in the way of the good. As the watered-down version of the 14th Amendment neared passage, he said that his “bright dream” for true equality had vanished — but he would still vote for the amendment. He would do so, he told his colleagues as debate concluded, because “I live among men and not among angels” — “mutual concession, therefore, is our only resort, or mutual hostilities.”








